1. We need content - in this case the page will probably be about genealogy or family history. You, or someone you can coax, will have to write up (in word pad or some similar simple editor is best) the contents of the various pages within your site. The site can be a simple one page affair that simply lists your research lines or can consist of many pages giving full histories, photos, surnames etc.

2 We need a graphics set (such as this one from The Mousepad) to give a page a little character or sparkle. There are many graphics sites on-line that have really great 'sets'. If you have one in mind, that's great - send me the URL (address) and name of the set that you are interested in and I will see if I can set the page up for you.

Generally the graphics are offered free of charge for personal (not commerical) sites, usually just in exchange for a link to the artist's site. To use graphics on your web site - you must download the graphic and save it to your own hard drive, then upload them to your ISP (Internet Service Provider) in this case Geocities. (You never 'link' your graphics (pictures) to an artists' site, as the additional traffic through their server can cost them a great deal of money - this practice is referred to as 'bandwidth theft' and some of the artists get very upset with it indeed - in fact some artists are starting to use a password system for surfers in order to avoid this misunderstood concept. Teach yourself how to save and upload your own graphics and everything will work out find on your site.

List of some Graphic Artists' sites:
Angel's Web Graphics
Cottage Row Graphics
Graphics by Shawna
Roxy's Place
The Mousepad

If you enjoy Celtic art on your web page there are:
Celtic Web Art

Keeping your site maintained!

If you are familiar with html coding and FTPing or uploading documents and graphics, then you should have no problem maintaining your web pages and can skip this next little bit!

Drafting, updating and amending a web page is done through a special 'language' called HTML (Hypertext Markup Language). It consists of a series of 'tags' (these are actually sets of instructions to a browser [ie Netscape or MSIE] on how to load the page or document that is being currently processed). The various tags set all of the parameters for the layout of the contents of a page - background, placement of graphics, spacing, font style, text size and colour etc.

This html 'coded' document is then uploaded to your server (Geocities) along with your graphics, music clips etc where they are placed in a directory or 'folder'. Depending on how large and complex your web site is, you could make up a number of various directories to organize your work.

If you are not familiar with html coding, Geocities has an 'editor' (a sort of form that you fill out) to upload new pages or amend your existings pages. I believe that you have to have a browser, Netscape or MSIE version 4 at least to utilize the basic editor.

If you are interested in learning html coding yourself, there are many tutorial sites and on-line courses available. In fact there is a basic html course that Geocities Heartland (WebTech University) puts on for its members - it is fairly painless - and the cost is right. I have found learning html coding to be very interesting. Once you know the basics - and you come across a really neat site and your would like to find out how they did (whatever it is that you liked), then you simply check out their 'source' code and try to work out something similar for yourself.